Hi everyone! I'm Mariina or better known here on the forum as co_martsu. I am the ceo of Colossal Order, the developer of Cities: Skylines. We work together with our publisher Paradox Interactive to bringing you the best city builder ever made and the quest toward that goal continues.
Big part of developing the game further is communication with the players and the community. We have been active in reading the feedback but haven't had as much time to comment as we would have hoped for. Therefore the idea is that I will be writing an update on a semiregular basis on what Colossal Order is up to so that you players can hear first hand what is going on in the development of Cities: Skylines.
Disclaimer: Some things are secret and I will try not to get assassinated by the Paradox marketing department so we'll keep this strictly to the points I'm allowed to talk about. I understand you probably don't value my life as much as I do, but we'll make this work, I'm sure!
It has been almost a year from the release of Cities: Skylines and we have since released tunnels and European buildings as a free update and After Dark and Snowfall expansions. The amount of sold copies, amount of players and especially the amount of requests caught us off guard last year and we have had to regroup to handle the new pressure set for us. I'm hoping opening the development side to the community can help us work together in making Cities: Skylines an even better game!
But that's enough introduction so let's get down to it. We are going through the feedback we have received for Snowfall in relation to the current expansion plans and in retrospect having two very visually oriented expansions right after each other might have worked better with a more gameplay focused expansion in between. We will take a small break on the new content and therefore during the spring Colossal will focus on bringing a couple of tools to the game as well as bugfixing, before starting a new expansion later this year.
That's why our dear community manager Escher from Paradox has been asking you, the community, to participate in discussions about what you would like to see fixed in Cities: Skylines. These requests will be ranked in three categories: Yes, maybe and no. We have a list of things we have wanted to fix in the game and will look forward to getting the feedback to seeing if we are at all on the same page. Issues that both the community and us developers find important are prioritized higher, but all issues and requests in the yes and maybe categories will be added to the wishlist. The wishlist is something that guides us not only in the prioritizing improvements but also affects the content in future expansions. I'm very much looking forward to getting the summary from Escher so we can get our hands dirty on making sure the wishlist represents not only our vision for the game but the community's feeling as well.
This week the team at Colossal Order is fixing issues for a quick patch. The patch will go through the QA before release and we'll keep you updated on when it is ready to go live. The most critical issue is to fix the shadows on Mac and Linux when the weather is in affect. We are tweaking the specular on the cliffs when it's raining, making sure the poor pedestrians aren't stuck between parks or unique buildings and gravel roads and adding the tram trailers to the asset editor. The trees looking weird after Snowfall update are also fixed now.
So that's pretty much it for this time and we're looking forward to getting that patch your way as soon as possible! And please let me know what you think, how often would you like to hear from us? Do you have anything specific in mind you would like me to write about?
Cheers,
Mariina
